STRO’s monetary tool ”C3” can be used in many ways. Read here the post of STRO’s CEO Henk van Arkel on how to combine the different C3-initiatives in Uruguay.

In Uruguay I stay with colleague and friend Camilo Ramada. Last Saturday he and his 90 years old Uruguayan granny visited three old friends that she hadn’t seen for years in Colonia, 110 kilometres from here.
So a quiet Saturday for me, which I used to make a table of all the C3-initiatives in Uruguay and see how they fit together. The point is that C3 allows a lot of uses: some users just use it as electronic money, because payments through C3 saves them from manual administration. Another use focuses on a region that needs a development push. There purchasing power that enters the C3-network will be rewarded, while those that want to distract the money from that region are discouraged to do so because of a fee they have to pay, called Malus.
In another C3-initiative we work with a credit cooperative that targets to reduce the interest rates for the small businesses they provide credit to. In that kind of C3 there is no need to request interest on loans for spending within the network. Only when somebody wants to spend with a company that isn’t part of the C3-network and therefore wants to exchange his claims for cash, the exchange fee that has to be paid includes the costs for the C3 to borrow the money needed for the exchange.
To mix all these needs is quite complicated. But very much needed, because when all initiatives cooperate it will be much more easy to keep the purchasing power circulate longer within the network, reinforcing the local economy and reducing the monetary costs.
After some running on the town-beach, I spent many hours puzzling to solve this issue........

Previous blogs by Henk van Arkel:
Research on mobile money
Training for start of C3-Uruguay
Training C3 for cooperative from Costa Rica
Uruguayan and Costa Rican cooperative both want C3